Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to information management, and more particularly to techniques for aiding an individual in managing work activities.
Many business software applications (e.g., purchasing applications such as Oracle Purchasing, general ledger applications such as Oracle General Ledger, project management applications such as Oracle Projects, human resources applications such as Oracle Human Resources, etc.) use workflow engines to facilitate the execution of business processes. Generally speaking, workflow engines generate and orchestrate the work activities required to successfully carry out an execution instance of a process (i.e., transaction).
In many instances, the work activities for a particular transaction will correspond to human, rather than computer, based operations. For example, a transaction to process an expense report may require review and approval of the expense report by a manager. In these cases, the relevant individuals involved in the transaction must be informed of their pending work activities and prompted to complete those activities in a timely manner.
Current business applications (and their corresponding workflow engines) communicate work activity information to individuals via a simple notification mechanism. For instance, returning to the example above, the manager responsible for approving the expense report would receive a notification (e.g., via email, text message, etc.) from the appropriate business application requesting review and approval of the report. This notification, along with any other notifications, would typically be presented to the manager in a list format (e.g., email inbox), ordered according to the time at which it was received.
One problem with the above approach is that the presentation of pending work activities as a simple list makes it difficult for individuals to visualize the relative time constraints associated with each work activity, as well as the relative costs of delay. This is particularly true if an individual is simultaneously involved in a large number of different, possibly cross-functional, transactions, and therefore has a large number of different work activities that she must prioritize and track. In addition, current notification mechanisms often provide little, if any, contextual information regarding a particular work activity. This further complicates work activity management.
Accordingly, it is desirable to have techniques that aid individuals in assessing, understanding, and acting upon all of the work activities they are responsible for in a timely and efficient manner.